Orlando PHP Tonight: Drupal

At DeVry University near the Mall of Millenia, tonight at 7PM, I will be presenting at the 2nd ever Orlando PHP user group meeting. David and Derek asked me to come talk about Drupal after my peanut-gallery comments during last month's framework shootout event.

Topics for discussion:

• What is Drupal? (origins, community, open source)
• Everything is a node, except the things that aren't.
• What's in a name? Drupal Taxonomy and Categories
• "Go ask your mother": Drupal's Access Control system.
• Modules, data types, and hooks, oh my!
• What's on the menu? Everything!
• Flexible sidebars with blocks, regions, and visibility.
• Content vs. Layout - Drupal Themes

I will also be showing off some of the features we used to construct the OrlandoFringe.org, FloridaCreatives.com and Petentials.com websites.

For those curious to learn more Drupal, we have a whole slew of lectures planned into the fall through the Florida Drupal group on groups.drupal.org - our meetings are second? Saturdays of the month at the MindComet offices in Maitland, just off of 434.

In other PHP UG news, the Meetup.com PHP group, hosted first Thursday of the month at the Bonnier Corporate HQ in Winter Park Village (above Brio) will be coming up June 5th. 4 programmers representing Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony will be building a blog in 10 hours using the same database tables, then taking another 10 hours to extend the blog platform. Hopefully this will serve as a fun and informative hands-on introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of these 4 popular PHP frameworks.

P.S. See Eric's Blog for a description of the Shootout rules.